Women on Wall Street

In today's New York Times, Geraldine Fabricant writes:

"When Sallie Krawcheck was hired six months ago as president of global wealth and investment management at Bank of America, she was besieged with e-mail messages from current and former Wall Street women celebrating her return to the fray.

Ms. Krawcheck had been forced out as head of a comparable unit at Citigroup in August 2008, a highly publicized departure. Hers has been the only comeback among the three highest-ranking Wall Street women removed during the financial crisis.

I don’t think I set foot in a restaurant where some woman did not come up to me and thank me for getting knocked around and going back in,” Ms. Krawcheck, 45, recalled in an interview at Bank of America’s corporate office in New York. “It was unexpected and quite fantastic.”
The outpouring over Ms. Krawcheck’s return reflects deep anxiety among women in the financial industry that their career paths are narrowing even as business picks up again."
____________________________________________________
Geraldine Fabricant, Fewer Women Betting on Wall Street Careers, New York Times, January 30, 2010

Warren Buffett has always been very pro-woman. He was one of only a handful of men invited to speak at the The Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, recently held in San Francisco. In a remarkable interview with Charlie Rose in 2004, Susie Buffett, Warren’s deceased wife, said:

“I find this a profound thing. I was talking to him one day on some racial issue, and he looked at me, and this Charlie, would have been 40 years ago. And he said to me, wait till women discover they’re the slaves of the world. Now how many men were cognitive of that and even women then? I am so impressed by that, and he’s very, very pro-women….He likes women. Yeah, he does, well why shouldn’t he?....My dad always said that women were the superior gender. And if women ruled the world, it would be a much better place. So I came from a father who loved women, and Warren feels that women all over the world get short-changed…. That’s why he is for eyerything that helps women be part of a level playing field.”
___________________________________________________
Susie Buffett, Charlie Rose Interview, PBS 2004

A few striking examples of Berkshire women executives follow:

"About 67 years ago, Mrs. Blumpkin, then 23 talked her way past a border guard to leave Russia for America, She had no formal education, not even at the grammar school level, and knew no English. After some years in this country, she learned the language when her older daughter taught her, every evening, the words she had learned in school during the day.

In 1937, after many years of selling used clothing, Mrs. Blumpkin had saved $500 with which to realize her dream of operating a furniture store. Upon seeing the American Furniture Mart in Chicago-then the center of the nation’s wholesale furniture activity-she decided to christen her dream Nebraska Furniture Mart.

She met every obstacle you would expect (and a few you wouldn’t) when a business endowed with only $500 and no locational or product advantage goes up against rich, long-entrenched competition. At one early point, when her tiny resources ran out, “Mrs B” (a personal trademark now as well recognized in Greater Omaha as Coca Cola or Sanka) coped in a way not taught at business schools: she simply sold the furniture and appliances from her home in order to pay creditors precisely as promised........

Today Nebraska Furniture Mart generates over $100 million of sales annually out of one 200,000 square-foot store. No other home furnishings store in the country comes close to that volume. That single store also sells more furniture, carpets, and appliances than do all Omaha competitors combined."
_______________________________________________
Warren Buffett, 2003 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter


"They would learn the essence of business. They would learn that taking care of customers is what it is all about. Taking care of them. I mean by that, giving them good deals, which nobody would touch. She did and working like crazy she was there day after day. She had a passion for it. The truth is, if you took the Fortune 500 CEO’s and I gave you the first draft pick on 10 of them, and I put them in competition with her; she would win." ________________________________________________
Warren Buffett, Charlie Rose Interview, PBS 2004

Susan came to Borsheims 25 years ago as a $4-an-hour saleswoman. Though she lacked a managerial background, I did not hesitate to make her CEO in 1994. She’s smart, she loves the business, and she loves her associates. That beats having an MBA degree any time.

(An aside: Charlie and I are not big fans of resumes. Instead, we focus on brains, passion and integrity. Another of our great managers is Cathy Barron Tamraz, who has significantly increased Business Wire’s earnings since we purchased it early in 2006. She is an owner’s dream. It is positively dangerous to stand between Cathy and a business prospect. Cathy, it should be noted, began her career as a cab driver.)
_________________________________________________
Warren Buffett, 2007 Letter to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders